Qantas has dramatically improved its Canberra-Sydney service so it's now as reliable as other routes in Australia. Flight cancellations are now on a par with those for other cities.
The latest figures show that in March, only 15 flights out of 936 between Canberra and Sydney were cancelled, a rate of 1.6 per cent.
At its worst, in July last year, the airline was cancelling more than one in every ten (11 per cent) of its Canberra-Sydney flights.
The steep improvement comes after the departure of Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce - to be replaced by Vanessa Hudson, who immediately promised to improve the airline's performance on many fronts, including the Canberra service.
At its worst nearly a year ago, the Canberra-Sydney route was the worst Qantas service between any two airports in the country. Now it's among the best.
The chief executive of Canberra Airport, Stephen Byron, said the improvement from that trough was "fantastic".
"Under the new CEO, Vanessa Hudson, Qantas committed to addressing their cancellation rates and she has delivered in spades.
"Credit where credit is due - we are most certainly very appreciative. This sort of reliability is important and in my view the turnaround will quickly rebuild passenger confidence in travelling by air on this route."
He said that reliability of all airlines on Canberra routes was now "excellent".
In March, there were no cancellations of the 103 flights to Adelaide, five cancellations of the 303 to Brisbane, none of the 53 to Gold Coast, two of the 438 to Melbourne and 12 of the 665 to Sydney.
"These results would be the best in the last five years," Mr Byron said.
Two factors may have brought the Qantas improvement.
The airline's public image was dire after the revelation that it had sold thousands of tickets for flights which it had already cancelled. It was selling something it knew not to exist.
The new chief executive immediately started addressing problems. The new broom allocated an extra $80 million out of profits to deal with what the airline called customer "pain points".
"We are particularly focused on bringing down cancellations on flights between Sydney and Canberra and the measures we have put in place over the past few months are helping," a spokesperson told The Canberra Times.
And Canberra Airport's Stephen Byron has waged a relentless publicity campaign for improvements by an airline he has not always seen eye-to-eye with.
Performance started to get better at the end of last year, when Qantas and QantasLink scheduled 838 flights between Sydney and Canberra but only 27 failed to take off.
Qantas said at the time that it had put a special effort into the route.
"We have been focused on reducing the unacceptably high number of cancellations on Canberra-Sydney flights, and the measures we have put in place have seen cancellations reduce over recent months.
"We know how important it is for all customers travelling to and from Canberra to get where they need to be on time."
